It is very easy to cavort on secondary playgrounds and there to defend Germany's title as world champion of trivialities. For example, you can invent texts for "Hungersteine". Our columnist leads by example.
As difficult as it may be, in these miserable times you have to try to find something good in the bad. Take the low water in the rivers, which revealed the many "hunger stones" and increases our knowledge of the past. "If you see me, then cry," says one. So now we know that German speakers started whining five centuries ago when things weren't going so well. Hartz IV didn't exist yet.
But the stones also bear witness to the stronger individualism of our time. After all, the author of the Wein-Stein addressed an unknown you in the future. And what are Anna and Andreas doing, these egoists? Carving into her cuboids "Anna 2018" and "Andreas 2003". I - known to be an impeccable, very good person, even if only according to my own assessment, various readers do not share the opinion - would of course have future generations in mind and leave to posterity: "If you see me, console yourself with the fact that we left no nuclear waste behind and invented the gender star."
Such encouragement is good when the food and the electricity have gone out. Of course, I could also carve a kitschy aphorism into the stone, as you can read a lot these days, when the apocalypse is finally looming: "Climate change is killing nature - and thus we are losing ourselves." sigh. You first have to digest the impressive content, preferably with like-minded people over an avocado breakfast with latte macchiato in Prenzlauer Berg, of course without farting that is harmful to the climate. Then there is advice on how to stop deforestation - preferably in favor of avocado plantings - how coffee farmers could be paid decently and whether a colon, an asterisk or an underscore in job titles is better suited to demonstrate progress.
It is very easy to cavort on secondary playgrounds and there to defend Germany's title as world champion of trivialities. And anyway: race comes before class, identity comes before everything - the progressives have recognized that, which is why they no longer care about the humiliated, but only about the offended. The reform of the pension, tax and health systems, above all care, the investment backlog in education and digitization - we can do it! Or? I'm afraid not. The money won't be enough.
After all: "You'll never walk alone," said King Olaf the Unclear to us, his people. That would also be a spell for a hunger stone. Was that his idea? Or did his PR consultants say to him: "King Olaf, you have to show emotions sometimes. Then you'll be loved even more." I suppose that was the reason why he recently looked at Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" - one of the four known versions - in Oslo, so that he could see a person who has feelings and shows them openly.
The Norwegian painted the work as a result of a state of shock. During an evening walk under the blood-red residual sun with friends near Oslo - never walk alone in Norway - he heard a frightened roar in the distance or imagined it. In any case, his companions went further, as he later noted. "And I stood there trembling with fear and felt a never-ending scream go through nature."
King Olaf must have liked the painting, it's very much in the vein of his progressive coalition. Ruled by sheer fear, the character cannot be assigned a gender. It looks rather masculine, but that's not entirely clear. Maybe it's a genderless bogeyman. Maybe he or she is just discovering that they are in the wrong body and don't know what to do. I'll admit that's being mean of me again - I apologize in advance so you, dear politically correct, don't have to email me what an idiot I am. I've known that for a long time.
I asked one of my best friends what King Olaf the Unclear might have been thinking when he saw the Munch painting. He replied: "We could use a railing like that in Hamburg on the Binnenalster. As usual, he ignores everything else. When he turned away from the picture, he couldn't even remember it. That happens to him quite often ."
My friend is very funny and clever, incidentally he has been involved with the SPD for decades. And now he's talking like this. This shows that there is a fair amount of doubt about King Olaf's ability and probity. "Anyone who orders a tour from me will get it." He announced that before the election. And now the people have the suspicion that he only said it like that, just because it sounds good. Nobody expects leadership from him anymore, so luckily we have Robert, the horse whisperer.
Even more communication would be nice. But when King Olaf the Unclear finally wants to speak, his government spokesman comes along and declares the press conference over. As recently, when our potentate really wanted to give the Palestinian king his opinion. You could see that his employer "briefly snapped at me when leaving the stage that I did it a bit quickly and he would have liked to have said something more," said the spokesman. I don't understand why King Olaf didn't just stand at the podium and say that he wanted to say something else. Strange. You want to scream with anger. As in the picture by Munch.
